Kent State coach Rob Senderoff still speaks regularly with Kelvin Sampson about basketball and coaching. But they don't talk about the NCAA penalty Sampson endured for the past five years, a penalty that ended Sunday.

The NCAA's "show cause" sanction essentially kept Sampson out of college basketball. For the past five years, he has been an assistant coach in the NBA, currently with the Houston Rockets.

Sampson's show cause was the last of the sanctions for "major" recruiting violations that forced the coach out of Bloomington and plunged the program into a years-long rebuilding project.

For the past five years, if an NCAA school had hired Sampson, it would have had to present an explanation of why it should not be punished for hiring him, and how it planned to keep the coach from breaking rules again. It's an onerous burden that usually keeps schools from touching a coach.

Sampson declined to be interviewed for this story through a friend. But now that he's free of that restriction, would he want to return to college coaching?

"I really don't know, to be honest with you," said Senderoff, a former assistant under Sampson at IU who also received a show cause penalty for the violations.

"I don't talk to coach Sampson about the sanctions. He's moved on, and I don't want to speak for him, but he's now coaching, working in the NBA, and I don't know if he thinks about it daily or not."

Senderoff is a rare example of a coach who was hired despite the show cause penalty. Kent State accepted recruiting restrictions for two-and-a-half years by hiring Senderoff.

Originally hired away from Kent State to Indiana, Senderoff returned to the Mid-American Conference school as an assistant just months after leaving IU. He became head coach in April 2011. Senderoff said he was "incredibly fortunate" to be given a second chance.

Not many coaches have returned to the sideline after a show cause penalty. Morgan State hired former California head coach Todd Bozeman after an eight-year show cause order for paying a player's parents while he was coach at Cal.

Sampson, who coached at Oklahoma and Washington State before IU, might not want to leave the NBA. As an assistant with Milwaukee, where he landed after leaving IU, Sampson worked closely with Brandon Jennings, who evolved into one of the league's best guards.

With Houston, Sampson's name has surfaced in connection with a handful of open NBA jobs in the last few years. He was 7-6 as interim head coach last season.

The rules Sampson and his staff broke related to phone calls to recruits that violated NCAA rules or restrictions from previous NCAA violations Sampson committed at Oklahoma. Most of those rules have been since been eliminated. Phone contact with recruits is barely restricted.

"Why the NCAA changed those rules, I don't know," Senderoff said. "Should they have been rules in the first place? I don't know. That's above my pay grade. It's just like the speed limit. You're supposed to follow the speed limit. ... The person driving the car doesn't get to make that decision. I shouldn't have transferred those calls to coach Sampson (to avoid a recruiting restriction), and I wish I hadn't."

Senderoff said he doesn't spend time worrying about how others perceive him, and whether his time at Indiana still stains his reputation.

Whether Sampson feels the same way, with the door now opened for a potential return to college, Senderoff said he doesn't know.

"I read what a lot of people have read, which is that he was a finalist for some head jobs in the NBA, and if that's the route that he goes, I would assume that he's gonna be a great NBA coach, given the opportunity," Senderoff said. "If he gets back into college coaching, he'd be a great college coach, given the opportunity."